insider look into the newest Simcity Glassbox engine

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    • RE: insider look into the newest Simcity Glassbox engine

      It's an interesting engine. I evaluated using it for a game pitch we were doing so I know bits and pieces about the internals. It centers around the idea of exchanging commodities and changing gamestate based on the values of those commodities. That's pretty much the entire engine. When new designers or scripters come on board, they have them spend a couple weeks building a simple simulation game. They've gotten some interesting results, like a forest fire simulator or a bee hive simulation. It's really powerful.

      SimCity is looking really good. I remember playing a build of it about a year ago; they've come a LONG way in a short amount of time.

      -Rez
    • RE: insider look into the newest Simcity Glassbox engine

      Originally posted by rezination
      It's an interesting engine. I evaluated using it for a game pitch we were doing so I know bits and pieces about the internals. It centers around the idea of exchanging commodities and changing gamestate based on the values of those commodities. That's pretty much the entire engine. When new designers or scripters come on board, they have them spend a couple weeks building a simple simulation game. They've gotten some interesting results, like a forest fire simulator or a bee hive simulation. It's really powerful.

      SimCity is looking really good. I remember playing a build of it about a year ago; they've come a LONG way in a short amount of time.

      -Rez


      what's the trend in scripting languages ? are they using Lua? I know some FPS are often using C style scripting language.

      The game is looking VERY good. I was sold until they showed up the size of the cities, it looked more like a Sim Village. I wonder if it was a technical limitation that pushed them to have cities this small. They allow building several small cities but this is still very limiting.
      MCSE/MCDBA/Programmer C,C++,PERL,PHP
    • Glassbox uses a custom-written scripting language. Every game company is different. Lua is probably the most common off-the-shelf scripting language for games. Python is another fairly common language. A lot of games use custom languages because they are trying to solve a very specific problem which they believe a custom language is good at doing.

      -Rez